I know it's an ancient query, but if anyone is still wondering, pressing SPACE is supposed to take you from the credits screen to the Choose a Pilot menu - only it doesn't work on a 1Meg ST.

If the ST has exactly 1Meg of RAM, it loads some hideous guitar music to accompany the credits, and this seems to mess up the keyboard input so that pressing SPACE doesn't do anything.To play this otherwise fine game in the Steem emulator, just set the RAM size to anything other than 1Meg. Bigger or smaller makes no difference. On an actual 1Meg ST you would need a way to resize system memory before the game runs, but I can't remember how you do that - probably there is a system variable that can be poked.

I remember many years ago it stopped working on my STFM (now stored in the attic) and I never found out why. It's the RAM upgrade, stoopid!

You could be right. I get the above results with the .st image of Pompey Pirates #22 in Steem 3.2 using UK TOS1.02 in each case.It's always possible the Pompey code (or even the emulator) has some effect on what happens, and for all I know Mastertronic may have fixed it for 1Meg. I still have the original disks, so if they're still readable I might get around to testing it on the STFM. The machine started out with 512K, but I'm no longer certain what it was upgraded to. At the time I thought the problem was to do with mouse/joystick combination. Possibly the joystick fire button should also advance the menu, but this is just vague recollection.I discovered Steem (and the availability on the web of all the old ST favourites) only a couple of weeks ago, and before realising you could fix Fighter Bomber by changing the RAM size, I was busily disassembling the Pompey loader (with Steem debug build), up to where it loads (and presumably decompresses) the Mastertronic code. Further delving in that direction might clear up exactly what the problem is, but I'm not promising to do it.